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Operation Wetback of 1954 is typically understood as a U.S. immigration law enforcement campaign that resulted in the deportation of over one mil lion persons, mostly Mexican nationals. This article, however, uses research conducted in the United States and Mexico to trace the decade-long buildup and binational history of Operation Wetback. JLn May of 1954, U. S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell issued an announcement. In the coming months, the U. S. Border Patrol would implement what he called Operation Wetback. As he explained it, Operation Wetback would be an intensive and innovative law enforcement campaign designed to confront the rapidly increasing number of illegal border crossings by Mexican nationals. As promised, during the summer of 1954, eight hundred Border Patrol of ficers swept through the southwestern United States performing a series of raids, road blocks, and mass deportations. By the end of the year, Brownell was able to announce that the summer campaign had been a success by contributing to the apprehension and deportation of over one million persons, mostly Mexican nationals, during 1954. Five decades later, Brownell's public chronicling of Operation Wetback 1954 con tinues to draw the basic framework for understanding the campaign as an intensive U. S. law enforcement campaign targeting undocumented Mexican nationals during the summer of 1954.1 Yet, BrownelPs account of Operation Wetback was a decade late Kelly Lytle Hern?ndez, assistant professor of history, UCLA, thanks the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation,

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Convicts and undocumented immigrants are similarly excluded from full social and political membership in the United States. Disfranchised, denied core protections of the social welfare state and subject to forced removal from their homes, families, and communities, convicts and undocumented immigrants, together, occupy the caste of outsiders living within the United States. This essay explores the rise of the criminal justice and immigration control systems that frame the caste of outsiders. Reaching back to the forgotten origins of immigration control during the era of black emancipation, this essay highlights the deep and allied inequities rooted in the rise of immigration control and mass incarceration.